Is it immoral to use nuclear weapons in war?

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Sorry, Nanking is absolutely relevant, as it shows who our enemy was. Forcing fathers to rape their own daughters; brothers their sisters; and sons their mothers, then killing them, was par for the course? If so, I have no more words to say.
 
Yes, it was. Look at the horrors Mao inflicted on his own people.
 
Okay. When you get back I suggest looking into the history of the massacres in Nanking. It’s not as cut and dried as Iris Chang makes it look. The death toll is disputed, the atrocities are disputed, etc
 
No, it was not 40% military; it was about 40% of the entire population killed. Truman’s defense was that he believed the Japanese populace would resist in a kamakazi-like fashion…as we know in this time of terrorists, it doesn’t take a lot of the population to have that mindset to cause a lot of deaths, both military and civilian. I can believe that. Having said that, he did not choose a target on the basis of what would cause the most destruction of military capacity with the least number of civilian casualties.

Truman made the decision (he said) as weighing about 150,000 total Japanese deaths against possibly 250,000 American deaths. The enemy was beaten, but at that time would not surrender, he was right about that. I can find no indication at all that Truman was told what fraction of the targeted population was civilian. He was pretty clearly targeting a civilian population in an area that did military production; sort of like wiping out a big WWII bomber-manufacturing city like Kansas City or something.
 
Yes as to the code. No, as to Japan wanting to surrender. This is the Sato-Togo corrrepsondence. A god education on it nmay be gleaned from Frank/DOWNFALL (best book on the topic) or Kort/THE COLUMBIA GUIDE TO HIROSHIMA AND THE BOMB(lots of original documents)They wanted the Soviets to broker a soft landing for a negotiated end to the war. Which was a non-starter. We were going to have the same unconditional surrender as we forced on the Germans for the same reason: to reconstruct the society of Japan, removing the Shinto-Imperial state, and getting a democratic one, with a figurehead Emperor. The kokutai, in other words, was going to be remade.

There is a lot more I’ve posted on this before, but it’s supper time.
 
I am aware that the Japanese government started the war with an infamous attack. I am also aware that Japanese military did things in China that literally shocked Nazi onlookers. I’m not making any excuses for the Japanese. They ought to have surrendered.

Secondly, I have tried to acknowledge that Truman was working on the intelligence he had with regards to the most likely scenarios with regards to achieving a total surrender. Hand-to-hand combat on the Japanese mainland was a non-starter. I don’t blame him for that.

My point is not to blame him for anything. My point is that if we knew what we knew now and had to make the decision again, in the place we are in now we could not defend the same decision. The question isn’t what he ought to have done. The question is what we can morally do now. It is very hard to defend the decision to drop atomic bombs now, with the information we have now. That is all I am saying.
 
So, we bombed a city full of civilians because we wanted unconditional surrender. Geez, man. I mean you just confirmed the article from The Nation.
 
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StudentMI said:
So, we bombed a city full of civilians because we wanted unconditional surrender. Geez, man
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The need was not just for unconditional surrender on paper. Truman knew that if the Japanese did not give up, the consequence would be unrelenting terrorist attacks during Allied occupation. This wasn’t about making them cry “uncle.” This really was about stopping the bloodshed, period. Let’s not make Truman out to be a bloodless bureaucrat who only cared about American lives; that is not just.
 
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I will never understand how someone can attempt to morally justify this.
 
I think I’m done with this thread. This is flipping depressing.
 
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Thank you! I can’t believe this thread lasted 34 posts before any links to actual Church teaching.
mdgspencer said:
According to this traditional Catholic teaching, the targeting of civilian populations is immoral.
However, using nuclear weapons, it has been said by Catholic theologians, can be justified if the target is a military one.
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Do you have any links? My understanding it that the Vatican has been pretty unequivocal about the need to de-nuclearize the world.
 
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One does not have to look to far to find a Catholic Theologian who holds political views that don’t exactly line up with Church teaching about war.
 
How do you not kill any civilians in a war? Is that a reasonable expectation. Please elaborate.
 
StudentMI said:
So, we bombed a city full of civilians
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There were no non-combatant civilians in Japan, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets, there were no non-manufacturing areas of either city, and conventional bombing sufficient to do the same damage to Japan’s military output would have resulted in similar casualties without providing a similar incentive to surrender.
 
No. He didn’t chose a target at all. He approved it.

The kamakazi defense was a formal plan, including the use of the civilian population, the Ketsu-go plan. It was expected to raise the butcher’s bill to the point we would have accepted less than an unconditional surrender.

A full Ketsu-go defense against an American invasion would perhaps not have taken 20 Japanese million lives (as one planner suggested might be the cost), but 10%, of that, not unlikely. The armed forces in Japan numbered around 2.5 million, with more in the occupied territories and islands. Thus the exhortation was for the willing sacrifice, in the defense of Yamato, of masses of civilians in addition to the military. The phrase gyokusai was often used in describing what would take place, “the breaking of the jewels/shattered jade”. That is, the sacrifice of the people, to ensure the survival of the Kokutai, the often referenced national polity.

Those numbers for the cost of the invasion of Home Islands are not part of the literature, by a factor on a whole bunch. See Giangreco’s book, or Frank’s, as referenced above.
 
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